DAVIS

we're back from davis!

it was a hectic and crazy three days, as always. while the tangible results might not show it, we did really well. i'm proud.
summary version: we ranked 15th, but did not get chosen for an alliance. [ironic! when we're 44th out of 48 we get chosen, but not when we're fifteenth?] and we didn't win any FIRST awards. although, team 100 bestowed upon us the "radical resourcefulness" award, which was fun :)

quick recap of each day...

thursday
- set up new driver's station
- as tends to happen with our tempermental paddle, code decided to just Not Work. it completely bypassed the "opening state" and wouldn't do anything. so we switched to a timer based code, which was effective although sketchy.
- the front brush gearbox literally fell apart. we superglued it back together.
- discovered one set of chain was absurdly loose, tightened it by taking off skateboard wheel and removing a link or two.

friday
- everyone else arrived!
- karlin showed up how to use a flat sequence structure to make the brains wait before checking the limit switch again, so the paddle would actually work. but it didn't, really...

- so half an hour before our next match, karlin erin caroline and i decided we HAD to add another limit switch. frantic drilling/soldering/coding/ziptying resulted in our winning that match! it was very exciting.

- we won 4 out of 6 matches! we were ranked 11th at the end of the night.
- chairman's interview went well
i can't remember what else happened...

saturday
- we won one out of our three matches, ranked 15th at the end.
- didn't get chosen for an alliance, but were the second alternate
- had judges in our pit all day, chatting and interviewing
- after alliance picking, we packed everything up and took all the crates out to the car, crated up sadie
-only to have an event volunteer come over to us tell us we had to get the robot out NOW because we were ON DECK. frantic uncrating and bumper attaching resulted, and then we were told, no, you're not on deck, you're just the alternate. so if ANOTHER robot fails, then maybe you'll be on in fifteen minutes. HA. well, i suppose it was a good drill. we now know we can uncrate and be ready to go in five minutes flat!


all in all, it was a great regional. hope everyone else also had a great time.

before atlanta: fix the paddle. yet again.

saturday at svr!

quick update of the rest of the competition...

we added some sheet metal to the paddle and rewrote code (now with four states) before our last two qualifiers. we lost both matches, but all the parts of sadie did work when they were supposed to! yay!

so it came as a complete surprise to us to be chosen for the 7th seeded alliance by 115 (monte vista) and 1120 (milpitas). i think it's funny that we ALWAYS end up in the seventh alliance - at least four times since my freshman year!

the first match did not go well - at first sadie wouldn't turn on. then when i tried to swap batteries, they wouldn't let me because we hadn't technically called a time out... eventually, the robot eventually turned on but connection kept flickering, and she would randomly stop during the match... it was bad. turned out to be a combination of a bad battery and bad battery lead which we quickly swapped before the next match
...which we also lost, apparently there we continued to have some wireless issues, which we need to test out on thursday of davis (the driver's station still read 12V throughout the match). but in general, we did well in that match. as in, all the parts moved as they were supposed to, anndini's driving was good... we lost, but ah well, even getting chosen was far more than expected!

jimmy will be helping us to make a larger circle for the paddle by davis.

all in all, it was an amazing weekend - while we did not do particularly well if you're looking at rankings/matches, i'm really proud. considering the numbers of mishaps we've had (especially electronics! eek! driver's station AND crio AND analog breakout AND battery problems...), sadie performed remarkably well. hell, we hadn't tested everything together until our first qualifier friday morning!

and we've still got davis and atlanta!

thanks to the huge number of people who arrived to support us! we had quite the green group of supporters.

svr friday

first thing - we won the xerox creativity award! i think i speak for the team when i say that we are delighted and surprised. the xerox creativity award recognizes a particularly innovative or creative mechanism. our pushbrooms, the subjects of many a bad joke, won us this award!

in light of the results of our matches, the award was especially exciting. because the matches didn't go fabulously...
-our first match went well and we won
-second match - the paddle got stuck and the buttons wouldn't work. however, before 3rd match, we added a "merde!" button that overrides limit switch code and just moves the damn globe motor.
-third match - we lost, but the robot itself worked well. the difficult part is getting close enough to a trailer
-i think my match numbers are off, but there was one match where we couldn't deposit any balls because the damn moon rock managed to get itself LODGED ONTO the paddle. so "merde!" button or no, we couldn't get any balls out of the tube.

however, all in all, it was a good day. and we've still got davis and atlanta! the xerox award's a pretty good way to start off :)

tomorrow - we attach sheet metal to the paddle to make the circle larger, and therefore ensure no balls get stuck on the paddle. that's the makeshift solution - larger welded circle planned before davis.

hope to see you tomorrow!

match schedule!

match # time
FRIDAY
6 10:05 581, 987, 1641 1700,115,192
14 11:01 359,670,1868 841,1280,1700
20 11:43 2135,604,3013 1700,254,3045
25 1:28 2643,649,1516 253,2159,1700
39 3:06 846,1700,8 1120,971,2035
43 3:34 1834,2628,675 2141,1700,668
SATURDAY
55 10:26 2489,1700,1868 114,2813,3022
60 11:01 2473,1700,2367 766,1458,1351

hope to see you there,
sherri

thursday at svr

oof. it's been a long, long day.
but FINALLY at 7:58pm, as we were being kicked out of the pits, we have FUNCTIONAL CODE that incorporates everything!

we never did manage to make it to a practice match. tomorrow will be a very exciting day! i'm confident that it will all pull together, somehow. i'll post the match schedule next.

quick summary of the day
-soldered up limit switch, attached tube, e board, etc
-discovered driver's station ethernet port didn't work, attempted to fix ethernet port, gave up
-got spare parts driver's station - we must return this on saturday.
-coding difficulty ---> lunch
-went through inspection
-reimaged crio, came back to test code and it would not work
-spent literally TWO HOURS with the nice people at the desk trying to figure out why we could no longer download code. it turns out that while they reimaged the crio, the didn't reimage the laptop. heh.
-discovered limit switch was having ISSUES. resoldered. discovered that the true state is the open state of the switch
-programming marathon led to FUNCTIONAL GATE CODE! it's written in three states, stopped, open, and close. button 8 opens the paddle, button 9 closes it. it's not perfect code, but it works for what we want it to, and it actually stops when we hit the limit switch

see you tomorrow! it's sure to be an exciting day.

Encoder Operational

So, after I plugged things in the wrong way a couple of times, the encoder works! We scaled it so that it measures degrees. The encoder thinks that 250 is one full revolution, but we wanted it to think that 360 was one revolution, so we told it to scale by 1.44. Karlin explained code writing for the encoder and how we could use it to turn the ball-dumping motor. There is some nice "pseudo-code" on the whiteboard in the programming room. We will plan on meeting in the near future. (ideas for times anybody?)

Jimmy is working on a mount for the encoder. He made the ball stopper larger so that the ball doesn't get stuck on the metal thing (like what happened on ship). I am going to drop off a globe motor to see if the shaft on the back can be extended to make a mount for the encoder.

Also, Nan, Anne, Anna, and Shifrah worked on building a beautiful new cart today. We bought some casters at ACE to mount on an 80-20 a and wood frame.

Just a reminder, If you have any outstanding reimbursements, please e-mail them to Ms. Mourad asap so that you can be reimbursed. Also, remember to turn in your permission slips to Ms. Mourad by tomorrow. These need to be signed by you and a parent. Next week is the Silicon Vally Regional, March 12-14. All team members are expected to attend a MANDATORY TUESDAY meeting next week to discuss the competition, preparation, and what to expect. All team members (unless you have already talked to me) should plan on being at the competition Fridayand Saturday. You will need to fill out an absence form for the classes you will be missing on Friday. Please feel free to invite people to come watch us at SVR. We would love to show more people our team and how fun FIRST is.

status of cRIO

the new one is on its way and i've boxed up the old one, to be sent back first thing monday morning.

i am not shipping back the breakouts/bumpers/whateverthey'recalled. i tried to call NI today to ask them about what exactly gets shipped with the new one, but couldn't get through to anyone particularly helpful. one woman told me to only ship the base, so that's what i'm doing. i figure worst case scenario, we end up with two sets of breakouts.

both chairman's and woodie flowers essays have been submitted!
judging for them at davis regional.

and she's OFF!

at 3:00 yesterday afternoon, after some crating difficulties, sadie was packed into her bright green box and loaded up into the fedex box.

CONGRATULATIONS.
maybe it's just because this is my third time through shipping, but it felt so much less stressful this year. even with, yknow, the broken cRIO and everything. we made it, guys! and sadie is beautiful. and when she works, she works gorgeously.

we have three weeks before SVR. and plenty to do before then...
-ida and i will be submitting chairmans & woodie flowers tomorrow
-ida, erin, and i are meeting the packard foundation tomorrow
-posters
-code documentation! i'm not 100% sure how to do this in labview. i guess just like maps and zoomed-in boxes?
-return the cRIO
-pray to god they ship the new one soon. and that the cRIO was the only issue.
-box of spiffy stuff to show judges, like we did last year
-check that the tube/globe motor is all ready to go
-finish up the bill of materials
-SIGNAGE
-autonomous code?
-pack for svr [can we try to pack stuff in 50lb crates already, and then just follow the list for davis/atlanta?]
-bits of pvc wire covers
-letter of rec from seton
-kpcb annual report

can anyone think of anything else we need to do?

this is unrelated, but annie has volunteered to lead the new crate effort for next year. i say we start on that as soon as competitions end.

HUGE thank you to our support team: beth o'malley and marsha abbott, doug for his crazy electrical knowledge and retail therapy tendencies, karlin for just always being there for us, jimmy for his machinist prowess and ability to make a motor mount in one hour flat, brian for helping out with the servo, mr. rockman for being there on ship and making us that delicious chocolate pie, everyone who we begged to open doors for us and did... we've got a long list. THANK YOU. we appreciate it. [and i'm really very sorry if i've forgotten someone at the moment.]

we made it through season, guys! and so much more smoothly. let me/erin know what you're interested in doing on the list of stuff above. i'm sure there's more that i've forgotten, too.

but for now, go sleep.

just a few hours to go

with the truck arriving in possibly four hours, we have hit a standstill.
late last night, in the midst of testing code [which did work! yayyy!] we got the error message no comm. that's happened before, and usually you just wait it out and then it's fine. but this time, it was not fine. upon further inspection, we discovered that the cRIO had no lit LEDs. checking voltage across the board, it was 24V at the input [correct] and 24V on the other end. but the thing just won't work. there's nothing we can do about - after scouring the forums, chief delphi, etc, we determined the only thing we can do is call NI, talk with them, and get a replacement. similar problems have occurs, resulting from a blown fuse within the cRIO (!)
the good news is that we do not have to ship the robot with the control system - so we'll call NI in a couple hours, and unless it's a quick fix, take off the control system and ship dear sadie off to svr.
i'm really relieved that we do in fact know the code works. there's nothing we can control at this point.


other "updates" that feel like ages ago
servo failed miserably at gating the orbit balls - after various reinforcements, we decided to use a globe motor. god bless jimmy and his motor-mount-making-magic. the plate extending from the motor still needs to be larger, but the globe is wayyyy better than the servo. we were able to suck spin and dump balls successfully last night. before the damn thing decided to break.

i have faith that somehow, things will work out. it's not likely that we'll get a functioning cRIO within the next five hours, but at least our first competition is a half hour away this year. we'll make it work.

thank you so much to everyone - we've had amazing support this year. when we are getting waffles made for us in the middle of the night, and mentors rush back to castilleja for programming "crises" that turn out to be us being done? we know we're well taken care of.

SADIE! SHE EXISTS!

now we just have to test code... HA!

after ship, pre svr

we made a list of stuff to do after tomorrow but before competition
posting it here before i lose the paper it's written on

-SIGNAGE. there's plenty of space to make legit gorgeous signs this year.
-pvc wire covers - we just need some 4" bits of pvc cut
-extra servo mount
-coding documentation
-kpcb award essay thing
-CART
-letter of rec from seton
-POSTERS (both carboard/science fair one as well as fabulous emily-esque poster)

status of sadie

that's right, she's named. sadie! and she's beauuutiful.

-both the top brush and the corkscrew work! it's amazingly exciting. and so so pretty!
-as of 10:30 tonight, the tube was not finished - anndini were doing some serious math to figure out angles/heights/etc.
-the tube has, however, been painted gatorbotics green
-electronics board. HA. well, we found out the black board was not polycarb. so jimmy gave us some new material to work with. which, it turns out, was also acrylic. joy. so we've gone through three electronics boards today. but jimmy mounted the final version
-battery mount and crio mount and kill switch all done
-woodie flowers and chairmans are on their way to being done.
-we started writing our names on the corkscrew and front brush - if you haven't get, be sure to.
-weight is not an issue. it's so relaxing to be able to say that.

see you tomorrow. we're so close, i can feel it.
we appreciate everyone's support so much - i've had multiple conversations just today about how much more smoothly this year's gone.

NAMES

she's alive

let's name her

gracie?
remmy?
janie?
corkie?

the tower's delilah.
and i am delighted that she works!
ahahaha.

two and half to go!

sunday, monday, and then we SHIP! almost there!

i don't have a complete idea of all that happened today, since programming/electronics remained at school while build was at ideo - BUILDING! i do know that the center brush for the corkscrew is done and works! so that's really exciting.

programming...
we wired up the actual electronics board. it's beautiful. even erin approves
drew out some shapes on lexan for a electronics board cage
reimaged the drivers station, after some difficulty.
bill of materials


things to do, off the top of my head.
-signage
-finish up the Essays
-bumper holes
-amber blinky light - where's it going?
-mounting of eboard + kill switch
-battery mount [i know we can't until the towers complete]
-test code, obv
-do we need to move the bars in the crate?
-let ms lonergan know when we want to be in the gym.

meeting at 10 tomorrow.

thank you to malaika's mom for chaperoning all day, and beth o'malley for delicious strawberries and cream, and jimmy for his machining prowess, doug for general Knowledge, brian for his servo-ing, and karlin for her ability to Make Stuff Work.
we're almost there! and the corkscrew WORKS! see you tomorrow at 10.

functional driving!

no pun intended...

karlin sent us a test drive VI which did basically what we tried yesterday to put inside the formula node. but in this code, the formula node only set the state, and then there was a case structure inside of which we actually told the motors what function to do in any given state.
for whatever reason, this totally works. we're not sure why (that shouldn't have solved our time delay issues) but we're just not going to question it. yay for working code.
but there are severe button coding issues which we'll address tomorrow.
autonomous technically works. one of the things that labview makes extraordinarily easy.

sallie and divya painted all the bumpers

anne and nandini and annie and anna and erin were at ideo - the tower is welded and back at castilleja. tomorrow they plan on finishing the tower, including brackets [to be riveted on] as well as all the funny pipe.

wednesday [FIVE DAYS LEFT.]

i fear these posts will become progressively more incoherent as the number of days grows less.

programming
-we tried that piecewise thing, first using a whole mess of case structures and such. it semi-sort-of-maybe worked, but in order to add PID loops, we had to add 4 or 5 of them. and something went badly wrong there - the robot just would not stop on time. it seemed like we'd added a lead time rather than a lag time (or maybe i've got it backwards). either way it DEFINITELY didn't work - after you pulled the joystick back to center (0,0) it would take many seconds for the motors to actually stop.
-so we attempted to use a formula node rather than uglygrossmess of case statements, as karlin suggested. the formula node essentially allows you to type code in c (!) into labview. as most of you can guess, this feature makes me really really happy. except then, the robot COMPLETELY did not work. at all. somehow, the motors received their values at different times. so if you moved the joystick really really quickly, then one wheel would start spinning, and almost as soon as it stopped, the other motor would start. they just weren't aligned, time-wise. although the control on the front panel thought they were getting the motor speeds at the same time. we tried to add a bias, which kind-of worked but not in a good enough way. according to karlin, there are Issues with the formula node.
-so tomorrow we attempt to write subvis which we can just place into robotmain. essentially, the subvi will take joysticky and joysticks and the output will get fed into the motor speed. that subvi will likely be the mess of case statements. although karlin says she thinks that there are smart ways to do it.

jimmy should be done welding tonight.

5 days. keep your chin up, we're almost there.

tired tuesday

apologizes if this is completely incoherent - as many can attest, i am not at my most alert tonight.

PROGRAMMING/ELECTRONICS
-i saw the chassis drive! it's actually really demented - the turning has funny spots and when we turn backwards (ie if the y coordinates are negative in normal coordinate systems) it doesn't actually go according to plan/how we would like.
-while it would be possible to drive the robot with the ArcadeDrive function FIRST provides, it wouldn't be the best idea because of issues listed above. we want driving to be as intuitive as possible. so...
-we're writing our own code, in a sort of "piecewise function" way. we divided the joystick axes into different regions and are writing different equations for each region. we only actually coded up the "band of straightness" and the... band of turning? anyway, i believe it spins well when the joystick is pulled either direction on the x-axis and the straight/fwd bwd part was fine.
-we know what we want to do for the rest of the regions, too. there wasn't time tonight to actually code it up, but our fingers are crossed that it will work tomorrow.
-we realized that we don't have a model of any drive code that's 100% functional - because benji never needed to go backwards, and when he turned, he generally strafed. and scotty? uhhh we didn't document code that year. nevertheless, with karlin and doug on our side, i'm confident we'll figure it out :)
-re: jrock's comment below, no talismans/rabbit feet/goat entrails were necessary for successful downloading tonight. amen.

BUILD
[obv this is not the complete version...]
-bumpers! the long ones were made and the shorter ones redone. allie served as inspector, and except for one that should not have passed inspection, they're all good. i think erin's going to get us the paint soon.
-erin and i did an alan steel run after school. the man definitely recognizes erin by this point. anyway, the tower tubing is here and will be delivered to jimmy tomorrow.
-brushes were attached to the tubing for the vertical corkscrew thing. apparently it spins really really fast.

OTHER
-chassis weighs 62 lbs with the battery and assorted wood/clamps. meaning we are at 46 lbs with motors and gearboxes on. obviously we'll be keeping an eye on weight, but i think it's safe to say that we're in pretty good shape, weight-wise. we have 70 pounds left. in order to simulate the actual robot, we strapped 2 20-lb weights onto the chassis.
-woodie flowers and chairmans are on their way to being written.
-we plan to put sponsor signage on the output tube, and 1700 signs on bumpers as in the past.
-NAME IDEAS?! the robot's alive, let's name her. definitely a her this year. name suggestions thus far: remmy, gracie, lily... i personally love both gracie and remmy. but keep the suggestions coming!

thank you to the amos family and mukherjee for food - double booked! as well as karlin and doug for infinite patience wisdom and good humor.

We're driving!

So, we're driving. The chassis is all done, and all we need to finish is the tower! Sounds easy... wrong. The drive code is mostly functional, however, the PID loop delay is making our turning while driving forward/backward a little difficult. The delay causes the wheels to respond slower, so this means that when we're turning (which is usually for a short amount of time) the wheels that are going more slowly don't even start turning before we're done with the turn. Once we brought the robot back from IDEO and had more space to test we could get the slower wheels to turn a little because there was more space to practice in.

Speaking if IDEO, Jimmy had been working away on the tower. I picked up some more materials from alan steel this afternoon, so we have almost everything we need for the tower construction. I will be picking up some more stuff tomorrow. Jimmy made a nifty thing around which to construct the tower, which will theoretically prevent it from warping when he welds it.

Build worked on constructing the center brush, but without a drill press, it was hard to center the holes, so they are going to try again tomorrow in the wood shop. I am going to buy one more broom for them to attach as well.

We have eight more days until ship (feb 17th) and we will be working furiously until then!

FINALLY

Hi!

Finally some successful programming :) After about three days of messing with it and trying to figure out the system, some success:
currently, all the drive code, button code for the brushes, servo code, and acceleration control are downloaded ON TO THE ROBOT! YES! there is also autonomous code downloaded, which successfully runs in autonomous mode. Although i havent yet figured out a fail safe method for downloading the code, i have a nice long list of suggestions to try when it wont download. here they are:
1. check to make sure code in another LabView project is not set to run at startup. To do this, go to Build specifications in the project explorer window, and right click on each real time application. Select “unset as startup”
2. disconnect from the cRIO, then try again. It is possible code is still running on the cRIO, but not on the front panel of LabView. To do this, go to the project explorer window. Right click on RT CompactRIO target, and select “disconnect”
3. re-build the real time application, then reset it as startup. To do this, right click on the real time application, click unset as start up, then click build, then when that is done, click run as start up (NOT set as startup).
4. WAIT FOR AT LEAST ONE MINUTE when you get the “cannot connect to the cRIO” error message. If it still doesn’t work, then click ok, and try again.
5. if the code does not work once you download it, make sure that the PWMs in the “open motor” VI front panels are set to something other than “invalid”; as long as the pwm constant on the block diagram is set to the correct PWM, I don’t think that it matters exactly which one its set to.
6. If you make changes, and want to run the code, make sure nothing is set to run at startup. If you make changes and want to download it to the cRIO, YOU HAVE TO REBUILD IT, then follow the appropriate steps for downloading.
7. if none of this works, im really sorry. Turn off the robot, close LabView, unplug the wireless router and drivers station, and panic. Just kidding. Unplug it all, restart it all, and calmly try again.

if these steps really actually dont work, then that is not good... but so far, this has worked to download all of the code today :)

build:
-bumpers are getting made! yay. w chassis design, we can now choose where to put the bolts
-more things (tubing, clamps etc) have been dropped off at IDEO. After some chatting with Jimmy, we know more about the chassis. The wheels are at the front, close to the outside of the robot. We are still determining where the gear boxes will go (likely way towards the front), and the exact position of the tower. Jimmy has made cool chain tensioning mechanisms, which are kinda tought to explain bc i havent seen them, but basically they make the chain cover more of the sprocket.
-allie has been working on drawing up the chassis in solidworks, and working with nandini to create drawings of the chassis

HOURS FOR THIS WEEK:
5-8:30
however, we will be meeting strict goals each night, which will be completed before leaving.

NINE DAYS until ship.